There's nothing a lazy writer loves more than the chance to retread some old copy. So allow me to retread. Mid last year I wrote a long feature on the coal industry for The Monthly.

In the course of the story I threw out some figures to demonstrate just how massive a juggernaut the coal industry was, compared to, say, the tiny little titmouse that is solar power.

Over the next 12 months alone, [I wrote] coal will earn Australia $43 billion in export revenue. That's not just a sum of money. It's a force of nature.

And it's petering out. The prices we'll get for that coal are collapsing as the demand for it evaporates. The thirty thousand workers who were then employed by the industry were supposed to be joined by another fifteen thousand, 'bringing with them vastly increased tax revenues and another quantum leap in export earnings.'

And the sums kept coming.

Estimated Queensland government royalty income from the coal industry in 2008-09? Two billion dollars. Value of proposed rail and port investments for black-coal export? Four billion dollars. Rio Tinto's profit last financial year? Eight billion dollars. Total value of committed investment by the coal industry? Twenty billion dollars.

Why revisit these figures from a time that now seems painfully naive and innocent? (2008, innocent? Can you believe I just wrote that?) Simply to put into perspective all of the flapping and squawking and headless chicken running around type behaviour of governments at both state and federal and even the international level as they try to protect us from what's coming, or what's already here for some.

Looking at those figures again, and comparing them to the meagre resources available to Canberra, and the state treasuries, I have a sneaking suspicion that all of the talk about stimulus packages, and rescue plans and bailouts and job summits (God, how I cringed when I heard that phrase rolled out) is really more about saving the jobs of incumbent pollies.

I'm sure they are staying up late at night worrying about us. But I'm sure they're losing even more sleep worrying about their own fortunes. It's only human, after all. But compared with the awesome power of a fully operation Deathstar - sorry, I meant economy - a couple of million here and there, even a billion or so shovelled directly into the furnace, is not going to keep the engine running at full bore.

That's not to criticise recent government policy, even though some measures such as the commercial property bailout are open to severe critique. It's just to point out that as the late great political scientist Murray Edelman once did that politics is often less about 'outputs' such as legislative programs or spending initiatives, and more about the creation of mass followings and support. From this point of view, political manoeuvring is the endgame.

Like a lot of people, my initial reaction to Mick Dodson picking up his Australia Day gong and immediately turning around to call for an end to Australia Day as we know it, was 'Cheeky bugger!'

But, having given it another two or three minutes' thought, I figured, 'Yeah, sure, why the hell not?' Nobody died to give us January 26, unless you count the handful of casualties from the First Fleet, and nobody does, do they?

If you look into the history of the day, it doesn't celebrate the founding of Australia at all. That happened 112 years later at Federation. (Or maybe 113. Sorry. Me sums weren't no good at school).

It doesn't even mark the arrival of the First Fleet, the lead elements of which had dropped anchor at Botany Bay a week earlier, before Governor Phillip decided to blow it off in favour of the larger and more sheltered harbour to north.

All the 26th marks is a drink.

On the evening of the 26th, with the Fleet arrived and the convicts and their guards disembarked, a couple of officers ran up a British flag and knocked back a few shots of rum while toasting the King. Phillip didn't even record the event in his journal because it had no significance.

Except to the local black fellas of course.

And it's not so long ago that for most punters, Australia Day had as little significance too. It wasn't much more than a free holiday. The current orgy of love for all things oi-oi-oi is a relatively recent development, probably reaching back to the mid-'80s and having something to do with government-sponsored hysteria in the lead up to the Bicentennial.

That's not to say there shouldn't be an Australia Day, but rather that it should be something that is for all of us, and the first step in doing so is to ask ourselves what are we celebrating? Governor Phillip and a couple of his unwashed ossifers having a drink at the end of the day? Or the total and undeniable Awesomeness of Australia?

I really think it's the latter. There is nothing in the unthinking, over-the-top national gropefest of the post-modern Australia Day that harks back to those close-of-business drinky-poos in a British colony a couple of hundred years ago. Nowadays, it's all about us. And since as a nation we're awesome pretty much 365 a year - except for Anzac Day, I suppose, when we're very, very sombre - there's no reason we couldn't just pick another Oz Day from the calendar.

The obvious, but impractical choice is January 1, the anniversary of Federation, when Australia really was born, but apart from the problem of everyone being too hungover from New Year's to care, there's the deal killer of losing a public holiday, since Jan 1 is already a day off. The Australian punter just won't stand for it

So I have another suggestion. Let's throw off the shackles of the British monarchy, declare a republic, and make that day the new Australia Day. We could even let Mick Dodson be the first prez, as long as he promised to stop guilt tripping us.

Gorging on the love like a truffle pig of, uh, love, yesterday while I watched the Inauguration, then the Inauguration Balls, and sometimes even the Festival of Schadenfreude to be had by contemplating the fixed grins and glassy eyes of the Fox News coverage, I got to wondering if and when the hangover was going to set in.

The highlight of the day? Some old black guy I saw on a live cross during Larry King who'd turned up with his granddaughter, who was beaming as though all of her tomorrows had dawned at once, while he choked up and bawled like a baby in a moment of release that was a long hard, lifetime coming. It was sweet. Not just his merciful release, but his granddaughter's innocence. She obviously grew up in a very different America to him.

Which raises the question of just how different America can be under Obama. The echoes of Lincoln and Washington rang out like church bells in his address, but the baseline was all JFK and 'what you can do for your country'. I have a lot of American friends who didn't vote for Obama, some of whom refuse to even call him 'President', and who stand by the idea that he's just an empty suit.

But I don't know. That guy looked serious yesterday when he started talking about the sacrifices he was expecting of the American people. (Sacrifices he'll also be expecting of long standing allies in places like Afghanistan too, just in case you're listening, Mr Ruddbot).

That line about putting aside childish things? If I was an American that'd sound kind of sobering, even a little daunting and scary, because the last 40 or so years have been all about a culture of instant gratification and id-fulfilment at all levels of society. Obama made it quite clear in his speech that he sees that recent history as a malignancy of American culture, one that lies behind everything from the financial meltdown to urban decay. Parsing the lines of the address you find a stern, moralising tone that would not be out of place in the pulpit of a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

America expects a lot of this President, but I have a sneaking suspicion, firming into a righteous certainty, that he expects even more of them.

Indeed, knowing that it cannot challenge the Israeli Defence Forces in any meaningful way, the destruction of the Palestinian enclave and the death of hundreds of innocents is not simply a dreadful side effect of the IDF's military incursion. It has also been a grim, but conscious objective of the territory's Islamist administration, and the Iranian backers, for the worse the horror, the more isolated is Tel Aviv.

For Hamas the torn body of every child is a weapon, just as much as any of the crudely, poorly directed rockets they insist on firing into Jewish settlements. For Iran, any talk of ceasefires or accommodation are treachery of the highest order. Hence the increasingly tense exchanges between Tehran and Cairo over Egypt's efforts to broker a peace deal. For Israel too, the death of innocents serve a dark purpose, in ensuring that its enemies know the lengths to which it is willing to go.

Nobody comes out of this episode covered in glory, but some undoubtedly do so with greater infamy than others. How you parcel out the measures of villainy doubtless comes down to your opinion of the actors before the latest drama began.

Some will hear nothing good of the Jewish state and would wish it gone, bloodlessly so, but gone nonetheless, as if such an excision might suddenly bring peace and enlightenment to one of the more benighted corners of the world. Some, on the farthest fringes of both left and right, might even secretly thrill to the idea of Israel being subjected to sort of devastation she has rained on her neighbours.

Others will see Hamas, and Hezbollah and behind them Tehran, as manifestations of evil, and would have no trouble hardening their hearts to the suffering of the Palestinians for as long as their cause is championed by such men.

Is there an end to it?

Not until the opposing sides can, as a first step, accept the existence of the other, and that is not the case at the moment with Hamas or Tehran. So entrenched is their hatred, so visceral and unrelenting, not just for the Jewish state, but of the Jewish people themselves, that there seems no hope at all.

So, who is this Emir what needs protecting from the depredations of some poor Sydney woman? And why can't the gummint do something about it?

There's just something so very wearying about the whole Nasrah Alshamery fiasco, Nasrah being the mother of seven who's currently doing a spot of porridge in Kuwait for having the temerity to backchat a border guard with issues about lippy chicks, emus and the Australian soccer team.

If there's anyone who hasn't enjoyed this saga so far, the Alshamery family were transiting Kuwait international airport when a bit of bother arose between old man Alshamery and a couple of security guards. In the time honoured manner of the Middle East the guards decided to rough him up, after a couple of hours of which Mrs Alshamery foolishly pointed out, mistakenly, that they were Australians and the guards couldn't treat them like Prince Harry having his way with any old bunch of ragheaded johnnies.

The guards disagreed and so she now sits, in a Kuwaiti jail, for having insulted the Emir.

Well, we've all had days like that, where through tiredness and even rank foolishness we've given a bit of grief to a clipboard Nazi who's then gone all shock-n-awe on us.

But, the foolishness of Mr Alshamery aside - in not taking his beating and paying the requisite bribe for the privilege - where does the Foreign Minister Stephen Smith get off saying there's nothing he or his department can do for her, beyond the usual tea and sympathy routine? I would say that it'd be different if Mrs Alshamery's ancestors hailed from County Limerick rather than Iraq - but actually I don't know that it would. I think he'd be just as lame.

Hopefully, Canberra's pre-emptive buckle is a mere public facade designed to distract attention from some furious backroom finagling and the mandatory settling of bribes and inducements. But again, probably not. The Minister is probably being quite sincere when he refuses to get off his arse and give the Emir a quick tinkle to remind him just how close he came to ending up as Saddam's butt boy - a fate avoided only through the intervention of outsiders, one of whom would like to call in a marker on Mrs Alshamery's behalf.

Makes you wonder what Stephen Smith actually does do for a quid. Since Foreign Ministerin' doesn't seem to be part of it.

A mincing walk, a limp wrist, a cocktail full of fruit salad and everything is in its place. I understand, from having worked for a couple of gay politicians down on Oxford Street, that amongst the rich, multicoloured tapestry that is the gay community, there exists one strand known as 'straight acting'. But it's a nice, well-mannered, properly dressed and manicured sort of straight acting, and thus very gay and not at all confusing.

But I am confused my friends, deeply confused and not at all happy, because over the summer break I have been forced to confront something I would rather not confront. The gay yobbo. In my very own neighbourhood.

Normally the arrival of a gay man in one's neighbourhood should be a moment of celebration. After all, you have been deemed worthy by an aesthetic intelligence far superior to your own and it cannot be long before more gay guys, and groovier coffee shops, more interesting book stores and way better restaurants, plus a general improvement in the tone of the joint, follow.

There is indeed a school of property investment that simply relies on following the gay dollar wherever it capers and gambols, raking off the cream of the improvement in values that inevitably follows.

But now, that whole scheme, and my admittedly wobbly understanding of the gay universe, has been, well, interfered with by the arrival in my bailiwick of a loud, boorish, beer-drinking, indoor football-playing yobbo, who apparently happens to like having sex with men. Violent beery sex that leaves nothing to the imagination of those forced to listen to it at four in the morning.

What is to be done I ask? What is to be done?

A couple of yobs descending on the neighbourhood? Fine. There are ways of dealing with them. A couple of gay guys appearing is simply reason to pop the cork on a bottle of Dom as you wait for the equity in your own pad to shoot skywards.

I can't tell you how excited I was when we all woke up on Christmas morning and rushed to find that Santa had delivered a great big box of Test Match.

Yessssssss.

A childhood favourite from before the Rise of the Consoles, I reckon I must have whipped my younger brother 800 times at that game as a kid. Go on, ask him.

There is something so determinedly tactile and analogue about Test Match, something so beguiling about the great green sward of the felt, the dense and intricate matrix of the scoring books, the couching fielders, the real ball, the batsman with a great plastic lump of bat, the bowler with his wonky little ramp down which you send the ball...

But... but...

Having waited so long for Santa to pony up a new one so I could learn my own son the sort of harsh lessons I had once handed a younger sibling, what did we find up upon opening said box but... change.

What's worse, change in the name of progress.

And a very questionable progress it was to, by my reckoning. Coloured clothing for fielders? Is this not Test Match? What role does coloured clothing play in a true Test match, except when discarded from the person of a drunken streaker a few seconds before they trespass into the playing arena to the vast amusement of all concerned. The little magnetic bars carefully placed between the fielders' legs to attract the small metal ball? Yes, I'll pay that as genuine advancement. But coloured clothing? NO! Goddamn it, no I say.

But this is not the worst transgression. The batsmen is now trigger operated, a much less robust and responsive system than the old string pulley method, and his bat is so slim and immaterial a thing that one fears one will never again sense that meaty thwack from a well timed shot to the boundary. Oh yes it all looks very space age and Cricketstar Galactica, but it is not an improvement. Nor is the spring-loaded bowler, who now flings his cherry through the air, with much less accuracy than the old system, in my opinion. Granted, it looks more spectacular, and perhaps a few weeks of practice might help. But by God, I don't want to practice. I want to be smashing stumps from the get go.

A line must be drawn and I'm drawing it here. I say we march on the house of Crown and Andrews, the makers of this once fine game, and lay siege until they come to their senses.

What do you call it when a virtual community is wiped out? Digital Homicide? Blogicide?

Over Christmas, Journalspace.com, which hosted my personal blog, got nuked, either by a disgruntled former employee, or bad luck, or poor management, or some malign combo of all three.

It went down just before Christmas, and because this had happened before, I didn't pay it much heed. But as the days went on, and no service resumed, I began to wonder whether it would ever come back.

I began to worry.

That might seem a bit odd. After all a personal blog, unlike Blunty here, which is a media blog, is surely nothing more than a diary. It would be a little upsetting to lose one's diary, but not disastrous. After all does the world really need to know my thoughts on the sexiest cartoon characters, or whether the Empire in Star Wars would totally beat down the Borg? (They would).

But Journalspace was not just a bunch of online journals. Almost alone among the big blogging sites it was, to use a much-abused cliche, a community. Real world friendships grew out of connections made in its virtual world and sometimes even more. Two regulars who met on my blog eventually married; one of them, a young writer from Newcastle, travelling all the way to Alaska to be with his now wife. And, I know for a fact that others who frequented my blog, Cheeseburger Gothic, have been getting together without me for beers and curry nights.

Other jspace-cadets did not have dozens of people on the favourites list, and would never make it into the top ten blogs of the day. But what they had was precious to them and an important part of their emotional lives.

All gone now. Never coming back.

I wonder, should this act of destruction have been the work of someone with a grudge against Journalspace, whether they had any idea of the unhappiness they were bringing about. Tens of thousands of blogs have been wiped, a whole world gone.

You'll excuse me if I've sounded a bit disconnected and rambling. I have a terrible man-flu and I'm still getting over this loss.

In this fast-paced go-go world of ours some issues are too important to be left to the ham-fisted, half-arsed witless hysterics of so-called web journalism. But that's too bad. Because that's all John Birmingham has. He's unfair, unreasonable and often unbalanced but in a good way. Words are weapons, and this weapon is a Blunt Instrument.

What makes this city tick? And what need be said, no SHOUTED, to keep it ticking in a true direction? Well-versed wordsmith Rupert McCall rides the undercurrent of a passionate notion all the way to the answers. Rhyme or reason? He'll let you be the judge...

The Magic Spray is a Monday sports column that affronts your senses like Dencorub to the groin. Like its real-life counterpart that's cured countless corked thighs, it may leave you feeling slightly numb, dulling the pain of another working week.

Mother, wife, housekeeper and family diplomat Heidi Davoren does a lot of laundry. She can peg a line full of undies quicker than George Bush can duck a flying shoe. For those of you who battle the mundane and ridiculous on a daily basis – school fees, preservatives, family budgets, soiled pants and banana stains – gorge on guilt-free parenting advice here.

For those who think gossip is a dish best served scalding, there's no need to wade through the magazines or cyberspace for the grittiest pop culture news. Because Georgia Waters has done that for you. She takes the celebrity world for the madness that it truly is. And it's enough to make a starlet choke on her silver spoon.

It's the blog that tackles the serious issues that impact on the lives of Queenslanders. We'll take on the bureaucracy; question and challenge the decision makers; put pressure on the movers and shakers and stick up for the little guy.

Babes in Business are Brisbane women that stand out in a crowd. Not only are they business owners, entrepreneurs, movers and shakers, they are wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and daughters. They'll give working women throughout the city the best tips on striking the balance between work and home life.

Regarded as history’s best female surfer, Layne Beachley is a seven-time world champion. But her drive doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. She's had success with her Beachley Athletic and in 2006, Layne staged the richest event in women’s surfing. Recently retired, Layne has turned her focus to investing in Australia’s future by inspiring young women to realise their full potential with her Aim For The Stars Foundation.

Sam de Brito has spent more than a decade writing for TV, film and newspapers. In his first book, No Tattoos Before You’re Thirty, he offers advice to his unborn children. In his latest offerings, The Lost Boys and Building a Better Bloke, he takes the pulse of Aussie manhood. Now it’s your turn as he expounds on the business of being a bloke.

James Cameron has been designing menswear for the past decade. In this time he has witnessed more than his fair share of trends and fashions, most of which should never have involved men, but men and fashion should not be mutually exclusive. There are a few guidelines every man should know and follow and still hold on to their masculinity.

Have a computer or IT problem or issue? Then just Ask Chris Thomas! Chris Thomas founded Westnet in 1994, and today runs Technical Support for the mid-tier Internet Service Provider. Chris has helped Westnet win countless awards for customer service in the ISP space.

Clive Dorman is one of Australia’s most experienced travel journalists. Every week for 17 years his column Travellers’ Check dealt with travel consumer issues. His weekly column now returns online looking at travel intelligence: where the value is, what to do, using the collective information-gathering of you.